


When I Became a Man

by lucybun



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-13
Updated: 2011-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucybun/pseuds/lucybun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson dreams about his perfect world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Became a Man

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose this is angst, though I don't think it's exactly sad. I've been in a bit of a grey place, and this is what happened when I should have been working on another story.

It isn’t what he dreamed about when he was a boy. The hair, the pallor, the smile, the frame… all wrong. What he wants, what he wanted, was so simple. Small, blond, kind, caring. Loves children and small animals. He would be Doctor Watson and she would be Mrs. Watson and they would live in a little cottage with their boy and girl and Old English Sheepdog. He’d had it planned out perfectly since he’d first laid eyes on Ms. MacNair, his Year 2 teacher, and wondered if she would wait for him to grow up so they could be married and live together forever.

Since then he’d changed. Perhaps not so much as other boys, but he had changed. He’d left his home, left his country, left his continent. He’d seen beauty in so many shapes and forms, but though his eye had been often turned, his mind’s eye never had. At night, when he was tired, sick, miserable, longing for damp air and grey skies, he kept coming back to his perfect little world. There was now a swing set in the back garden and the dog was now a Corgi, but nothing else had really changed. It was eternally springtime there, buttercups blooming and sunshine just warm enough. It was eternally glorious and eternally his, and one day, one day, he would make it real. Every time he washed the sand out of his eyes and every time he felt the grit of it crunch in his teeth, he closed his eyes and thought of yellow flowers and the creaking squeak of a swaying swing and held on a little longer.

Then he woke up one day with a hole in his flesh and a hole in his mind. A sniper’s bullet had nearly taken his life, and it had apparently taken his dream. Oh, the memory was still there. He knew the details by heart: the white house, the pussy willow, the bright red door. They were still there, but he was not. John Watson was no longer there, part of the dream, part of this perfect world. No, he had been reduced to watcher, audience, non-participant in his own life, in the real world and in his dream world. He woke time after time, sick from nightmares, panting, sweating, aching from the brutality of the past, and he tried so hard, so damn hard, to get back there. To walk up the garden path, hug his children, kiss his wife, but he simply couldn’t. He stood on the pavement, outside the gate, and watched them laugh as he cried the tears that he despised in any and every world.

Then he came home, and felt the damp and saw the grey, and longed for a springtime and a picket fence that wouldn’t come. He had stern talks with himself, talks about how it was perhaps for the best that this ridiculous dream wouldn’t come, about how it was time he grew up and realized that such juvenile dreams were pathetic in a man pushing forty. And each night he had such thoughts, he woke in a sweat and thought of the gun in his bureau that would make all dreams stop.

He went to his therapist and talked when he must. He bought a laptop and tried to write. But the only thing he wanted to talk about, the only thing he wanted to write about was of a world he could no longer visit. A silly, childhood dream that he rationally knew would never have existed anyway, but it was his world, his perfection, and it hurt, physically hurt, not to go there. He limped through the murky reality of London, leg dragging under the crushing weight of a dream denied.

Then he met Sherlock Holmes, and he was all wrong. The dark curls, the pale skin, the crooked grin, the angular height. All of him was exactly wrong. But he went with him anyway, because why not? What he wanted most was already lost to him, so what was left to risk? His life? His sanity? His freedom? They all seemed like paltry things when compared to what he could never have.

Though Sherlock was indeed all wrong, John discovered almost immediately that he certainly was an exciting mistake. Exciting, irritating, maddening, fascinating — and fun. He hadn’t had fun since he’d stood in thick grass and pushed an imaginary child on an imaginary swing. He hadn’t giggled in the real world for longer than he could remember. He looked at Sherlock laughing with him in a dim hallway and thought maybe that crooked, crinkly grin wasn’t precisely wrong. It was really a bit too nice to be completely wrong.

For months, those first few months with Sherlock, he quit dreaming. No good dreams, but no bad dreams either, and relief over the absence outweighed the bitterness for the first time in a very long time. Then he woke up in a bright white room, ears ringing from the blast and lungs burning from the smoke, and realized that he’d been dreaming once again. He’d been dreaming of dark hair and lopsided smiles and take away Indian, the hissing hum of a Bunsen burner and the bubbling of strangely colored liquid in clear glass beakers. He’d been dreaming of bad wallpaper, worn rugs, and a leather sofa. All of it right. All of it perfectly, absolutely right. He felt the sting and the drip of blood down his chin as he beamed in his hospital bed, and that was just right, too.

He began to dream of home every night. 221B and Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock, always Sherlock, and it took his lip a very long time to heal. Finally, he was released and allowed to return there, and it was like walking in a dream. The dull pavement, the shadowy hall, the creaky stairs, all of it just like his dreams, but real this time.

Then he walked inside and saw his colleague, his friend, and all of his boyhood plans, all of his young man’s dreams, were burned away in the bluish gleam of the wrong shade of skin and the greenish glow of the wrong color eyes. Later that night, with the delicious taste of that skin lingering on his tongue and the light of those eyes shaded by china-thin eyelids and thick, dark lashes, he decided it might be time for new plans, new dreams, a new idea of perfection. One that was real, one that was his, one that he would never be denied. One that centered around the perfectly wrong, horribly right man lying in his arms. Forty was perhaps a bit late to finally put away childish things, but he supposed it was better late than never. That night John Watson fell asleep and dreamed his dreams… and woke up the next day and lived them.


End file.
